Silas Howard and Harry Dodge Put a Queer Spin on the Buddy Comedy in Charming San Francisco Picaresque By Hook or by Crook

BY HOOK OR BY CROOK
(Silas Howard and Harry Dodge, 2001, USA, 100 minutes)

"I’m a special; a two for one."
--Valentine (Harry Dodge)

Co-directors Silas Howard and Harry Dodge's By Hook or by Crook opens with home-movie footage of a father playing with a boyish tyke in a Superman cape. In voice-over, Shy (Silas Howard, who also co-produced) explains that he was that kid, and that he just wanted to jump, to fly. 

In the present, things haven't quite worked out that way. His loving father recently passed away--he never really knew his mother--and he has just received notice that their Hoxie, Kansas home is being repossessed. Shy, a loner who likes to smoke, lift weights in a "Simply the Best" muscle tee, and "jam out to Sabbath," as he puts it, has 48 hours to find new digs. 

Though Shy's neighborhood seems more downmarket than not, Go Fish cinematographer Ann T. Rossetti, shooting in MiniDV, shows it to its best advantage. It isn't so much about glamorizing an un-pretty place, but finding the beauty in the quotidian, like a freight train glowing in the sun.

Left: Guinevere Turner and V.S. Brodie in Go Fish

Silas earns his keep by washing dishes, and he's barely scraping by. While watching a news report one night about a heist involving an attractive, dark-haired thief (Joan Jett!), he comes up with a solution. Soon, he puts on a suit, packs a bag, and hitchhikes to San Francisco, where he aims to put his plan into action. I'm not sure where the suit, which he pairs with a glittery shirt, comes in, but it's a good look.

Shy meets Valentine (Dodge, an author and visual artist who uses he/him pronouns in real life), a butch dyke with an odd little beard, when he steps in to stop a bully from beating her up. Val, who has been on her own since she was 13, starts following Shy around, talking a mile a minute, fueled by a combination of gratitude and the recognition that he's also a gender outlaw, to borrow a term from trans elder Kate Bornstein. When a little girl asks Shy, "Are you a boy or a girl?," he smiles and says, "Both," without hesitation.  

If the actor/directors have an instant rapport, it could be down to acting, but they had also been friends for 15 years by the time they made their feature, even running a tiny Bay Area café and performance space called Red Dora's The Bearded Lady where cabaret duo Kiki and Herb frequently performed.

Right: Harry Dodge and Silas Howard at the Bearded Lady

Shy and Val proceed to spend a night on the town, eating crullers and visiting lesbian bar The Lexington, also long gone, filled with every kind of person. 

There's a neat montage in which customer after customer poses for the characters or for Rossetti's camcorder--both, really--and it's clear that the new friends fit right in. 

Shy, however, still has money--or the lack thereof--on his mind, and ghosts Val while she's dancing up a storm, making sure to pick a customer's pocket on the way out, but he reconnects with Val and his girlfriend, Billie (Stanya Kahn, Dodge's longtime artistic collaborator), the next day. The first thing they do is to run a scam on a clerk at a hardware store after which they enjoy a rather unusual homemade dinner. 

While planning and plotting other ways to make money, they get to know each other better. Though Val's motormouth, physically-expressive affect is amusing, and somewhat reminiscent of Dustin Hoffman's Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy--also made by a queer filmmaker--she isn't simply cute and quirky, but mentally imbalanced, and admits she's spent time in a mental institute. Val appears to be schizophrenic; I wasn’t sure, but she can be sad and weird in ways that don't/aren't meant to make complete sense.

When Shy finds out that Val is committed to finding her birth mother, he decides to help, which proves personally advantageous. If Val starts out as the one with a lady love, Shy hits it off with a no-bullshit Vital Records staffer (Carina Gia). While mainstream 1990s films with queer characters tended to be rather skittish about sex, Howard and Dodge give the people what they want, which is satisfying sexual experiences for their characters. 

Billie also joins in on some of their schemes, but it's Shy and Val who attract the wrong kind of attention, leading them to put the planning and plotting on hold as the narrative briefly enters One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest territory before ending on a considerably more positive note. 

If anything, the ending is especially touching for keeping things understated after a few sequences that felt overstated. 

Beyond the chemistry between the leads and the sensitive cinematography from Rosetti, the film has an absolutely kick-ass soundtrack, filled by music from composer Carla Bozulich of the Geraldine Fibbers featuring the ace guitar-playing of Nels Cline, who would join Wilco just three years later. 

Bozulich also served as music supervisor, and she did an incredible job. I swear I'm not biased, though I've met a few of these musicians, since she includes Pacific Northwest acts Jessamine and the Mono Men, in addition to Tom Robinson, the Make Up, Low, Blonde Redhead, and of course, Tribe 8, the Geraldine Fibbers, and Joan Jett--you can guess what song she covers.  

By letting Shy and Val be who they are, rather than trying to define them, By Hook or by Crook feels not necessarily timeless, but less frozen-in-amber than I would have expected. Even the terms I've mentioned, like queer, trans, and bull dyke, don't appear in the film (unless I missed them). 

Nonetheless, Dave Kehr, in his New York Times review, wrote, "It is, indeed, hard to keep track of the fluid genders in this independent feature shot on digital video, which proclaims itself ''a movie about butches by butches'."

For my money, there's nothing confusing about that fluidity. It helps that the film hews to a certain 1970s aesthetic, though I couldn't say whether that was intentional or not, but I was reminded of Jerry Schatzberg's Scarecrow, in addition to Barbara Loden's Wanda and John Huston's latter-period literary adaptations, like Fat City and Wise Blood, more in terms of the working-class milieu than the hetero characters or downbeat narratives.

Right: Al Pacino and Gene Hackman in Scarecrow also smoking up a storm

Other latter-period films that came to mind include Allan Moyle's Times Square--which also boasts a kick-ass soundtrack--and Annette Haywood-Carter's Joyce Carol Oates adaptation Foxfire. 

Significantly though, both films had to tone down the queer content due to studio pressure. Berkeley filmmaker Jenni Olson, who served as a consulting producer on By Hook or by Crook, has done some of the best writing on Times Square as a queer text, so I was happy to see that she lent her expertise to a film, made outside of the studio system and largely funded by friends, that doesn't play things quite so safe. 

Until this year, I hadn't heard of the film, though I'm familiar with some of the projects on which the principals have worked, like Transparent and Pose for which Howard served as a director, so I kept my expectations in check, though I took the number of prestigious entities behind the 4K restoration, especially the UCLA Film & Television Archive, as a promising sign.  

By Hook or by Crook also won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at 2002's Sundance Film Festival--and has received praise from discerning critics, like Willow Maclay, coauthor of Corpses, Fools and Monsters--so I'm even more surprised that I hadn't heard of it, but Altered Innocence, which specializes in LGBTQ films both new and old, has been getting the word out in a big way, and the filmmakers have been doing all they can to support the re-release. Mostly though, it’s just really good. 

Though the filmmakers would part ways geographically when Silas Howard moved to New York and Harry Dodge moved to Los Angeles, they remain connected--Howard is godfather to Dodge and Maggie Nelson's son Iggy.  

Unstreamable presents By Hook or by Crook at Northwest Film Forum from June 17 through June 21. A DVD, Blu-ray, and digital release will follow later this summer. Images from Altered Innocence, The Guardian (Go Fish), Lost Womyn's Space (Bearded Lady friends), and the IMDb (Scarecrow).     

I'm Tense and Nervous, and I Can't Relax: On Cindy Sherman's Underappreciated Office Killer

OFFICE KILLER 

(Cindy Sherman, USA, 1997, 

82 minutes) 

Cindy Sherman has been photographing herself in various cinematic modes since the 1970s, so it only seemed fitting when she turned to directing in the 1990s, but Office Killer, her first and only feature film, defied expectations in ways that weren't especially welcome at the time. 

 

First of all, she turned to horror, and instead of something hip and arty, like Michael Almereyda's Nadja from just a few years before, she made a smart, if lurid B picture, the kind that might have played on a grindhouse bill in the 1960s or '70s--and that's hardly a knock. In retrospect, the lack of pretension seems refreshing, but that isn't how critics saw it in the 1990s. 

 

As a film critic, I'd rather evaluate films than criticism, but whether you consider hers a smashing success or not, 25/100 ("splat!") at Rotten Tomatoes and 5.2/10 at the Internet Movie Database just seems mean. 

 

Right: portrait of the artist 

as a younger woman
 

Fortunately, the tide has been turning over the past 30 years, and screenings of the new 4K restoration have expanded from the art house to arts venues, like the Museum of Modern Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art--in addition to the expected theatrical suspects--the same institutions that have displayed Sherman's photography in the past. 

 

Unlike those photographs, though, she cast someone other than herself in the lead. In light of Carol Kane’s filmography, especially Joan Micklin Silver's Abraham Cahan adaptation Hester Street--for which she received an Oscar nomination--it seemed wise to cast an experienced actor, unlike the director, who has never attributed her varied characterizations to "acting." It could be seen as a step in that direction, though the expressions in her work tend to be ambiguous, the better to let observers decide for themselves what she's saying and what her characters might be thinking. 

 

Granted, Office Killer, like some of her photographs, is as much satire as horror, though critics responded more to the blood and guts than to the perceptive take on office politics. On the other hand, if she had released the film after Office Space or the original UK version of The Office, she might have also been dinged for unoriginality. Instead, she beat them to the punch, though something similar could be said of Jill Sprecher's 1997 non-horror Clockwatchers, which also focused on female office workers and garnered more respect on the festival circuit than in regular release. 

Just as Sherman didn't cast herself, she didn't write the screenplay, but hired notable talents to transform her story idea into a feature. Tom Kalin, who made a splash with the Leopold and Loeb-inspired Swoon in 1992, co-wrote the screenplay with journalist Elise MacAdam and Todd Haynes, another architect of the New Queer Cinema, though only Kalin and MacAdam receive on-screen attribution; Haynes is credited with "additional dialogue," even as several reviews and film listings describe him as a co-writer.

 

Left: the killers of Swoon

 

By 1997, Haynes had already directed two full-length features, Poison and Safe, while Kalin wouldn't direct another until Savage Grace, another deadly drama, with Safe lead Julianne Moore. 

 

Christine Vachon--and Pamela Koffler--who named Killer Films after Office Killer, produced all four features. If I wouldn't describe Office Killer as a queer film, it absolutely would not exist without these queer collaborators. 

Sherman's debut begins as Constant Consumer magazine, beset by declining ad sales, cuts costs by reducing full-time jobs to part-time and distributing computers for remote work. Kane's Dorine, caretaker for her mobility-impaired mother (Alice Drummond), isn't exactly thrilled about spending even more time at home–"I hate her!," she declares in voice-over. 

This part of the film reminded me of Daniel Mann's Willard in which Bruce Davison also plays a bright, hard-working loner with a demanding, bedridden mother (Elsa Lanchester!) and an asshole of a boss. Like Dorine, he's a ticking time bomb, but while she's a cat person, he's…a rat person. 

 

Though valued for her dedication and intelligence, Dorine doesn't socialize with her colleagues, who find her weird. They have no idea. 

 

While some, like Norah (Jeanne Tripplehorn, who had recently appeared in Waterworld), the office manager, treat her with respect, others, like Kim (Molly Ringwald, relishing her bitchy role) and Virginia (Fassbinder ensemble player Barbara Sukowa), the publisher, make little effort to disguise their contempt. 

Dorine proceeds to divide her time between home and office. She's working after hours one night when Gary (Cyndi Lauper's guy David Thornton), another of her more condescending colleagues, is accidentally electrocuted while trying to stop her new computer from buzzing. Anyone else would be horrified, but Dorine isn't anyone else. "You are not a very pleasant man!" she upbraids the newly-minted stiff. Though she does call 911, she hangs up without saying a word, shoves his body onto a cart, takes it down to the garage, puts it in her car, and drives away, presumably to dispose of it. 

Unlike her gossipy, bed-hopping colleagues, Dorine masters email in a flash–to the extent that she can imitate other people. They express concern when Gary stops coming into the office, so she finishes his assignments and sends updates from his address, assuring them that he's just working from home.

Though she inadvertently contributed to his demise, it emboldens her to take a more direct approach going forward, and she proceeds to eliminate most everyone who has ever done her or the magazine founded by her late father wrong. 

Granted, Dorine gets so fired up, she even takes out a few innocent bystanders. Sherman handles this in a way I found more humorous than not, but it might have been a bridge too far for some 1990s viewers.

There's also a victim that doesn't fit any of these categories, and it's his interest in pornography that appears to set her off. In flashbacks, Sherman introduces Dorine's problematic father (played in a persuasively lascivious manner by Eric Bogosian). He has everything to do with her skittishness around men, women, and even the most innocuous physical contact, since she visibly flinches when anyone touches her on the arm or shoulder. 

In taking charge of her environment, after a lifetime of ill treatment from colleagues and family members, Dorine changes both inside and out. At first, she sports dorky buns on each side of her head and crookedly drawn-on eyebrows--Sherman, who drew them on each day, expresses regret in the exclusive Vinegar Syndrome interview that she didn't do a better job. 

With each kill, Dorine's confidence grows, and she incorporates items from each female victim's wardrobe, like a pair of chunky gold earrings and a pearl necklace. She even lets her hair down in all senses of the term, while wearing her new acquisitions brazenly. The fact that no one notices proves just how invisible she has been to her coworkers for the past 16 years. 

If you've seen J. Lee Thompson's Happy Birthday to Me, you can guess what she does with all of the corpses. I won't give the game away, other than to say that, as Covid-19 proved: some people aren't meant to work from home, which wasn't common in 1997, but now makes the film seem prescient, especially in conjunction with a dying print publication, an overburdened caretaker spending more time on a relative than herself, and the replacement of phone calls and in-person conversations with email. Just add Slack, Zoom, smart phones, and laptops, and this could be today. 

If Office Killer were a different kind of film, cops might come sniffing around, but before things get to that point, Dorine comes up with a solution. Granted, Kim suspects her from the start, but she can't prove it, not least when Dorine finds a way to keep her as far from the action as possible. 

The epilogue borrows a trope from 1944's Double Indemnity–though it could be coincidental–except Billy Wilder was limited by the production code. Even Daniel Mann, in Willard, provided the kind of ending with which the censors would approve, but Sherman, by way of her collaborators, provides an ending for a new era, specifically the one that gave us Cypress Hill's "How I Could Just Kill a Man," Nick Cave's Murder Ballads, and Sonic Youth's Goo with its Raymond Pettibon-designed spree-killers cover. 

Another 1990s phenomenon: Sherman's shift from fine art to commercial filmmaking around the same time as several other NYC gallery stars. Robert Longo, her former partner, adapted William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic in 1995, David Salle adapted the play Search and Destroy the same year, and Julian Schnabel wrote and directed Basquiat, a portrait of the late graffiti artist-turned-painter, in 1996. Coincidentally enough, Longo and Barbara Sukowa--though now divorced--were married during the Office Killer shoot.

All four attracted experienced actors, producers, and distributors, but poor reviews and box office results doomed three, whereas the Oscar-nominated Schnabel, a better filmmaker than fine artist, kept going, and his new Netflix film with Oscar Isaac, The Hand of Dante, opened in Seattle on Friday. 

Right: two exes and ex-directors in 2014

I don't believe it benefited Sherman, the only woman in the group, to be associated with other feature films that were described variously as "trash," "shabby," "desultory," "off-putting," "slack and derivative," "undramatic and unexciting," "breathtakingly derivative," and "a disaster in every way," but that's what happened. 

Thirty years on, it's easier to appreciate her film for what it is rather than what it isn't, and it bears closer comparison with other chillers about lethal loners, like Willard, George Romero's Martin, and especially Lucky McKee's May than anything with pretensions towards grand artistic statements.  

Not everything works perfectly, but a talented, game-for-anything cast goes a long way. Kane, Tripplehorn, Ringwald, Sukowa, and Michael Imperioli as a kindly computer tech all deserve credit for taking chances on an inexperienced director, especially after working with heavy hitters, like Hal Ashby and Martin Scorsese, though Tripplehorn, in her open-hearted interview, acknowledges that she approached Sherman to let her know she would do literally anything to be able to work on her film. She says she loved working on it, and has maintained a friendship with her ever since. 

Left: Barbara Sukowa as, essentially, Arianna Huffington

The other extra features include a freewheeling conversation between Sherman and Ringwald, a detail-rich interview with cultural critic Dahlia Schweitzer (Cindy Sherman's Office Killer: Another Kind of Monster), a superfan like Tripplehorn--who once wrote to the artist for career advice and proceeded to take it--and a commentary track from programmer and film historian Heidi Honeycutt (I Spit on Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies). 

 

It's a great package, well worth your time and money, though I regret that none of the other principal players got involved. I hope it's because they were too busy, and not because they regret their participation in the film. 

Carol Kane, above all, really delivers, since it's always clear through her body language and vocal inflections what Dorine's thinking, a quality she's brought to such diverse roles as the sweet, timid Gitl in Hester Street--who also loosens her hairstyle by the end--and the sensual, forthright Carla in Between the Temples. She's also consistently entertaining, frequently quite funny, and among few performers able to master a character who so fully transitions from a "freaky little mouse," to quote Kim, into something else entirely--and if you really want to see Kane get freaky, Kier-La Janisse favorite The Mafu Cage, also directed by a woman, is the film for you.  

Though I knew Cindy Sherman by reputation, I had seen a few of the bad reviews, and took a pass when Office Killer came to Seattle's Grand Illusion during its original run, even though I lived just down the street. I wasn't particularly interested in horror cinema then either, but times have changed and so have I. 

 

In Sherman's conversation with Ringwald, with whom she appears to have forged another long-term friendship, she lets it slip that she might finally be open to directing another feature. Whether she does or not, I'm glad she's finally getting the accolades she deserves. Not all one-shot directors have been so lucky, and if you've ever worked in an office, you're likely to relate to Dorine on some level, whether you care to admit it or not--and it's probably for the best that you don't. At least not on the company Slack. 

 

Office Killer is out now on Blu-ray/UHD via Vinegar Syndrome. Additional features include an interview with cinematographer Russell Lee Fine (Pamela Koffler's husband) and video from Jeanne Tripplehorn's personal archives. 

Images from the IMDb (Carol Kane in closeup and with Alice Drummond plus Eric Bogosian, Molly Ringwald, and Barbara Sukowa), International Center of Photography (Cindy Sherman; no photographer credited, but presumably a self portrait), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Daniel Schlachet and Craig Chester in Swoon), Stephanie Berger / The Hollywood Reporter (Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo at the Kitchen), and R.L. Terry ReelReview (guess who).   

Lost and Found Film Reviews: Gus Van Sant's Milk and Malcolm Ingram's Small Town Gay Bar

Pride Month seemed like the ideal time to revive these Amazon reviews that dropped off the site over the years, since both queer-oriented films are well worth watching.

Milk is one of Gus Van Sant's best films, and I'm still amazed that the counterintuitive casting of Sean Penn pays such dividends. He isn't the first actor who would've come to my mind to play Harvey Milk--and not because Penn is straight, but because his vibe is completely different, whereas his uber-macho posturing in P.T. Anderson's One Battle After Another proved less surprising and led to his third Oscar after Mystic River and Milk.  

Lightly revised from the original text.

MILK 

(Gus Van Sant, USA, 2008, 128 minutes) 

When a famous person, like the nation's first openly gay male city supervisor, inspires an acclaimed book (The Mayor of Castro Street) and an Oscar-winning documentary (The Times of Harvey Milk), a biopic can seem superfluous at best. Taking over from Oliver Stone and Bryan Singer--who were attached to the project at various points--Gus Van Sant, whose previous motion picture was 2007's lower-budget, more experimental Paranoid Park, directs with such grace, he renders the concern moot. 

Unlike Randy Shilts' Milk biography, which begins at the beginning of his life, Dustin Lance Black's Oscar-winning screenplay starts in 1972, just as Milk (Sean Penn, in a finely-wrought performance) and his boyfriend, Scott (James Franco, equally good), move from New York to San Francisco. Milk opens a camera shop on Castro that becomes a safe haven for victims of discrimination, an experience that convinces him to enter politics.

With each race he runs, Harvey's relationship with Scott unravels further. Finally, he wins, and the real battle begins as Milk takes on Proposition 6, which denies equal rights to homosexuals. He does everything he can to rally local politicians, like George Moscone (Victor Garber) and Dan White (Josh Brolin). 

While Mayor Moscone is willing, conservative board member White has serious reservations, and after Milk fails to back one of White's pet projects, the die is cast, leading to the murder of two beloved Bay Area figures. 

If Van Sant captures Milk in all his complexities--he was, for instance, a very funny man--Milk also serves as an enticement to grassroots activism, showing how one regular guy elevated everyone around him, notably Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch), the ex-street hustler who created the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial. Released in the wake of Proposition 8, California's anti-gay marriage amendment, Milk is inspirational in the best of ways: one person can and did make a difference, though the struggle is far from over. 

SMALL TOWN GAY BAR

(Malcolm Ingram, USA, 2006, 76 minutes)

It's easy for city dwellers to take gay bars for granted, but Bear Nation filmmaker Malcolm Ingram presents the other side of the picture. Social opportunities are considerably more limited for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals in rural America. With production assistance from Kevin Smith, Ingram focuses on several communities in Mississippi. 

While some gay-themed documentaries are depressing and others inspiring, Small Town Gay Bar is a bit of both. Rick Gladish, for instance, owner of Rumors nightclub in Shannon, created an oasis for the local LGBTQ community, but remains closeted from his Pentecostal parents. Scotty Weaver, on the other hand, was open about his sexual orientation. And brutally murdered because of it (Ingram speaks with Weaver's family).

As Gladish notes, "As far as being gay in Mississippi, it's hard, it's very hard." Proof comes in the form of Reverend Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church, who states categorically, "God hates fags." Other subjects include patrons, bartenders, drag performers, and strippers. In addition, Ingram looks back on bars that have closed over the years, which lends his debut documentary a nostalgic air, though he concludes with new beginnings for two of them. 

Small Town Gay Bar isn't as heart-wrenching as Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning or Daniel G. Karslake's For the Bible Tells Me So, which cover similar territory, but that doesn't make its voices any less valuable--and a soundtrack filled with Canadian alternative acts like the Hidden Cameras and Broken Social Scene is a nice touch. Extra features include unbridled commentary from Ingram and chats with Smith and editor Scott Mosier.

Milk is on Prime Video; Small Town Gay Bar is unavailable to stream.

Images from the IMDb (Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch, and James Franco in Milk), Netflix (Small Town Gay Bar), and Filthy Dreams (Rumors, R.I.P.).  

Bob Fosse, Lenny Bruce, Honey and Kitty Bruce, and Fosse’s Bleak as Hell Biopic Lenny

LENNY 

(Bob Fosse, USA, 1974, rated R, 

111 mins) 

"He never served any time, and he never paid any fine. He only paid with his life."--Howard Solomon, owner of the Cafe Au Go Go

Kitty Bruce, the only daughter of Lenny Bruce, passed away this month at the age of 70. Like her father and mother, Kitty struggled with drug abuse, but unlike Lenny, she kicked the habit and went on to become the keeper of his flame, overseeing every project involving his work with tact, taste, and understanding. Lenny was unlucky in many ways, but he was fortunate to have a devoted daughter who looked after his legacy with such care. 

Whether he was lucky to be immortalized by Bob Fosse, in a film released eight years after his 1966 death from a morphine overdose, is another story. Kitty, as a character, plays only a small role in the biopic, but it's an authorized portrait, and both daughter and ex-wife served as advisors. 

Fosse's third feature, an adaptation of screenwriter Julian Barry's 1971 stage play, begins with a pale, frame-filling closeup of a narrow-lipped mouth. Lenny's fame rests primarily on the things he said--things that offended straight society and small-minded vice cops--so it must surely be his mouth. It isn't. The mouth belongs to Honey, played by former showgirl Valerie Perrine. 

This bait-and-switch establishes that though Fosse will be focusing on Lenny, the more famous member of the duo, he prioritizes Honey's perspective, and not due to any feminist impulse on his part, but because she outlived her ex-husband, and throughout the film, she reflects on their relationship to a tape recorder wielded by an unseen interviewer--voiced by Bob Fosse. 

Harriet Jolliff, aka "Hot Honey Harlow," was working as a stripper in 1951 when she met the former Arnold Schneider (Dustin Hoffman back for more grit after Straw Dogs), who was working as a comedian, but the screenplay neglects to mention that he was also serving in the Merchant Marine after a stint in the Navy. (Tony Award winner Cliff Gorman, Broadway's "Lenny," played the Lenny-via-Hoffman standup comedian in Fosse's All That Jazz.) 

Two months before Kitty, Valerie Perrine passed away at 82, whereas her now-88-year-old costar remains active, most recently appearing in Daniel Roher's Tuner (though accused by several women of sexual harassment in 2017, Hoffman has faced no significant repercussions). Most Perrine obituaries led with Richard Donner's Superman, in which she played Lex Luthor's main squeeze, and it's understandable--the 1978 movie was her biggest hit--but Fosse gave her her best role. For her efforts, she was awarded Best Actress at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival.  

It wouldn't have been in character for the director to depict Lenny's childhood, and he doesn't. Consequently, I don't recall any mention of his UK-born, podiatrist father, Mickey. Instead, Fosse introduces him as an aspiring standup emceeing strip shows around New York (much as Fosse did, in Chicago, in his younger days). It wasn't Lenny's ultimate goal, but he enjoyed looking at the scantily-clad ladies, so it wasn't exactly the worst gig in the world, and without it, he wouldn't have met his first and only wife. 

Fosse also presents Lenny's ancestral home as one dominated by women, especially his supportive mother, Sally Marr (Jan Miner), also a comedian. 

Sally shares her flat with his aunt, who isn't as supportive of his use of profanity or his shiksa stripper fiancée, leading to moments of levity in a film that isn't all that funny--including Lenny's act, which plays like on-screen narration, since it's so intensely autobiographical. (As Fosse told Hoffman when he asked, "I don't think Lenny Bruce is funny.") I mean, Roger Ebert wasn't wrong when he wrote, "We get, instead, a sort of hostile therapist who preaches liberation through the defusing of highly charged words."

The results are insightful, to be sure, and Hoffman is a convincing stage performer, but Lenny has got to be one of the least funny A-list films about a comedian ever made, and not just because of the bleak, tabloid way he died. 

True to Fosse's form, though, it's never boring! It's also beautiful in its ugliness. Bruce Surtees, who received one of the film's six Oscar nominations, shot the entire thing in high contrast black and white, and many sequences--especially the last--play like crime-scene photographs come to life. Fosse also peopled Lenny's stripshow audiences with sweaty, leering, pock-marked faces, recalling Diane Arbus's queasy work. To quote Sean Baker, "B&W cinematography and production design is A+...and the editing by Alan Heim has the rhythm of a Lenny Bruce stand-up show." 

Initially, Honey is the star, and Surtees shoots an early striptease from a low angle as if she were a goddess. Perrine shines like a diamond, much as Jessica Lange would in Fosse's All That Jazz five years later. Or Mariel Hemingway in 1983's Star 80, his final film. In the early-1950s, though, Lenny was just a schlemiel, a schlimazel--to quote Laverne & Shirley--stumbling through showbiz impressions for an audience of hard-drinking, chain-smoking manly men who just wanted to watch ladies disrobe. The well scrubbed, mixed-gender, collegiate record buyers would come later. 

It isn't an auspicious start, but Honey finds Lenny "cute" and "huggable"--and he can't take his eyes off the statuesque glamor gal. There's a sequence in a diner in which he stares and stares, but what should be creepy really isn't, even as Honey, dining with an older comedian, coyly pretends not to notice. 

Fosse presents their entire courtship as intensely romantic--rooms filled with flowers and the whole bit--amidst the squalor of their surroundings. 

In short order, they put together a double act, but it doesn't really take off, so Honey returns to stripping despite Lenny's increasing discomfort with the male attention she attracts. They need the money, and though it isn't exactly an excuse, he understands the impossible situation he has put her in, admitting on stage, "That's where the conflict starts! We all want for a wife a combination Sunday school teacher and $500-a-night hooker."

He may have old fashioned notions about women, but Lenny's no-holds-barred approach to comedy proves so far ahead of its time that older comedians, like a Milton Berle-type, insist he clean up his act. In the film, he does nothing to curry their favor, which might have helped his prospects, except he's honest to a fault and refuses to kiss up to sleazy old men who grope his wife, so it's fortunate he has an agent, Arnie (producer Stanley Beck), to look out for him (Barry based the character on Alan Sobel). 

Lenny's rise through the ranks is marked by more downs than ups. 

When he and Honey are in a serious automobile accident, for instance, and she lands in the hospital with her pretty face bandaged-up like Rock Hudson in Seconds--and where she develops a taste for morphine--he has a fling with a candy striper. Fosse doesn't depict anything untoward, but Honey figures it out soon enough. 

She recovers, and the two push on to Detroit before ending in California. By this point, they're both addicted to heroin. In 1955, Harriet gives birth to Kitty, but their marriage continues to falter, and they split two years later. 

Left to her own devices, Honey's life completely unravels, and she ends up serving a two-year bid for possession. Fosse proceeds to depict Lenny as his daughter's caretaker, which wasn't the case at all--his mother took her in. 

While Honey is doing time, Lenny releases records and buys a house in the Hollywood Hills--thanks to Steve Allen and Hugh Hefner, he also makes several television appearances, which Fosse omits--but the high times don't last long. Just as Honey is getting her shit together, he starts to lose his. 

Other than one disastrous gig that plays for an uninterrupted seven minutes, Fosse speeds through this period mercifully quickly--unlike Robert B. Weide's detail-oriented 1998 documentary--though Lenny's troubles went on for years. It isn't just the drugs, but a string of arrests for narcotics and obscenity that exacerbate his paranoid tendencies. Granted, he had every right to feel persecuted: one arrest was for saying the word "schmuck" on stage--schmuck! In truth, it wasn't so much about the profanity so much as his outspoken opinions about the Vietnam War and the Catholic Church. 

It's hard to watch, and Fosse has no interest in exploring the politics of the situation--I don't recall any mention of the War or the Church–but the reality is even worse than the bummer he depicts. At the end of his life, Lenny wasn't slim and trim like Hoffman, but bloated and barely comprehensible. 

Fosse's film ends when Lenny does: with the comedian, naked, stretched out on the floor of the house he was about to lose. Though alone when he died, he had a housemate and a fiancée, except they're excised from the picture, and Fosse doesn't even cushion the blow with an intertitle or two.

I was 10 when I saw Lenny for the first time. 

My father, a fan of the comedian, took me to the film upon its original release. Near as I can tell, it never occurred to him that it might not be suitable for a child--and thank God for that. I only saw my divorced dad, who lived on the Left Coast, once a year, and I welcomed any insight into his preoccupations, no matter how dark. Nor was it a passing phase. Thirty years later, he gifted me with Lenny Bruce - Let the Buyer Beware, a six-CD boxed set compiled by Hal Willner with assistance from Kitty Bruce and Lenny producer Marvin Worth.

So, I've always had a special place in my heart for this grim, if beautifully-crafted picture. Dad held truth-to-power guys, like Lenny and Richard Pryor, in high regard, and it's especially sad to think that today's truth-tellers are facing similar reprisals--not so much through the courts, but through politically-motivated cancellations--simply for describing things as they are. 

After Lenny's death, Honey Bruce published a 1976 memoir, remarried, and built a new life for herself in Hawaii. None of this is mentioned in Lenny. It all happened years later, and doesn't have much to do with the story Fosse chose to tell: the story of a man as seen, primarily, by the woman who loved and lost him. But the love continued in its way as Honey and Kitty, with the assistance of petitioners Richard Pryor, George Carlin and Robin Williams, worked to clear his name, and in 2003, they secured a posthumous pardon from New York Governor George Pataki. Honey died two years later. 

With the passing of Kitty Bruce, who didn't have any children, Lenny's bloodline comes to an end, but Lenny lives on as an acid-tinged portrait of the vital necessity--and terrible fragility--of free speech rights in America.

Lenny, in a new 4K digital restoration, is out now on The Criterion Collection on Blu-ray and 4K+Blu-ray with a 2015 commentary track from Nick Redman and Julie Kirgo (from the Twilight Time release), a new interview with Alan Heim, a new essay from Mark Harris, and archival interviews with Bob Fosse in print and Dustin Hoffman and Valerie Perrine on French TV. 

Images: the IMDb (Hoffman's eyes, Perrine's mouth, the two together, Perrine with Jan Miner, and Perrine in the hospital), Valerie Perrine / Facebook (on stage), and Dangerous Minds (Honey, Kitty, and Lenny Bruce).

Lost and Found Family-Oriented Film Reviews: Graduation and Rachel Getting Married

I wrote these now-revived reviews for Amazon and 

The Stranger. 

The review of Rachel Getting Married dropped off Amazon after awhile, though several versions of the DVD remain for sale; this tends to happen with consistently re-released home videos. Graduation, on the other hand, remains on The Stranger site, but the last third got cut off for some odd reason.

GRADUATION 

(Cristian Mungiu, Romania, 2016, 128 minutes) 

It's tragic that some kids don't get enough love. It's even more tragic that some don't get any at all, but Romanian master Cristian Mungiu's Graduation takes on a father whose love turns toxic when put to the test.

The shift from benevolent protector to poisonous antagonist occurs after an unknown assailant attacks Eliza (Maria Dragus from Michael Haneke's anti-fascist fable The White Ribbon). Granted, Romeo (Adrian Titieni, who recalls Belgian everydad Olivier Gourmet) is less of a model citizen than he appears. He's a control freak and an adulterer, but Eliza is one scholarship away from attending Cambridge, and she has to ace her exams, so the respected physician calls in favors and encourages her to play along.

It goes against everything for which he and his perma-fatigued librarian wife, Magda (Lia Bugnar), raised their only child: to reject the corruption that characterizes Romania, a country Mungiu portrays as a post-communist wasteland of Brutalist buildings and parched greenery.

Just as Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne directed Gourmet as the ultimate bad-good dad in 1993's The Promise--with Jérémie Renier as his son--DP Tudor Vladimir Panduru frequently depicts Romeo from the back such that his body speaks for him in a way his face and voice can't, reinforcing the constraints of his environment (fittingly, the Dardennes served as co-producers). 

Graduation isn't as harrowing as Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days or Beyond the Hills, but it's just as unsettling in a more restrained register.   

RACHEL GETTING MARRIED

(Jonathan Demme, USA, 2008, 108 minutes) 

Pitched somewhere between Robert Altman's A Wedding and Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding--but more cautiously optimistic than either--Rachel Getting Married marks a change in course for Jonathan Demme. Granted, few Oscar-winning directors have walked a more diverse path. 

After a series of documentaries and remakes, The Silence of the Lambs filmmaker tries his hand at the intimate chamber drama, and with the help of actress Anne Hathaway (The Devil Wears Prada) and actress-turned-screenwriter Jenny Lumet, daughter of director Sidney, he pulls it off.

The festivities kick into high gear once Kym (Hathaway, with smeared eyeliner and unkempt, blunt-cut hair) takes a break from rehab for her sister's big day. It soon transpires that Kym, who hides her wounded soul behind a veil of sarcasm, serves as the Buchman's resident black sheep. The problems go deeper than drugs to a tragedy in which she played a part.  

As Kym, Rachel (Mad Men's Rosemary DeWitt), their parents (Bill Irwin and Debra Winger), groom Sidney (TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe), and the rest of the bohemian Connecticut brood struggle with the past, the nuptials continue, graced by performances from past Demme collaborators, like Sister Carol East (Something Wild) and Robyn Hitchcock (Storefront Hitchcock). The hours between the reception and after-party toggle between humor, affection, and painful revelation. 

In the film's production notes, Demme claims that he and cinematographer Declan Quinn (In America) attempted to make a film that looked like "The most beautiful home movie ever made." By using handheld cameras and focusing on believably flawed characters, they've done just that.

Images from the IMDb (Adrian Titieni and Maria Dragus in Graduation and Anne Hathaway, Rosemary DeWitt, Tunde Adebimpe, and Mather Zickel in Rachel Getting Married) and RogerEbert.com (Hathaway and DeWitt).

SIFF Dispatch #7: Music, Movement, and Community in Sky Hopinka's Powwow People

POWWOW PEOPLE
(Sky Hopinka, USA, 2025,
88 minutes)

It takes a village to make a feature, and Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk, Pechanga) assembled the equivalent to make Powwow People; one in front of the camera and the other behind the scenes. 

Adam Piron (Kiowa, Mohawk), Sterlin Harjo (Seminole, Muscogee)--the creator of Reservation Dogs and The Lowdown–and other prominent Native American figures helped to produce the documentary, Hopinka's second full-length after 2020's maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore. 

Danny Glover's Louverture Films, known for backing projects of cultural importance, also loaned their support. Julian Brave NoiseCat (Secwepemc), the co-director of 2024's Sugarcane, even shows up as a dancer in the film. 

Since 2014, Ferndale-born Hopinka has worked primarily on short films, seven of which Seattle Film Critics Society presented on May 15 at Northwest Film Forum (below right). Eric Zhu, who put together the program, also presented Hopinka with SFCS's John Hartl Pacific Northwest Spotlight Award on May 17 after a SIFF screening of Powwow People. 

Hopinka built his second feature, which premiered at last year's Cannes Film Festival, around an opportunity he created in 2023 for Indigenous singers, dancers, and drummers to come together to celebrate their culture, knowing that he would be documenting the whole thing for posterity.

Though the film plays as one day, the event took place from August 22-24 at Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center in Seattle. Throughout, Hopinka shows the hard work and camaraderie that goes into putting together a powwow, an event with which another recent Pacific Northwest feature culminates: Fancy Dance from Erica Tremblay (Seneca–Cayuga Nation) with Lily Gladstone (Piegan Blackfeet, Nez Perce), first recipient of the John Hartl Award. 

As a structuring and thematic device, Hopinka follows four individuals: the down-to-Earth Gina Bluebird-Stacona (Oglala Lakota), who works on setup, the avuncular Ruben Little Head (Northern Cheyenne), the master of ceremonies, the soft-spoken Jamie John (Anishinaabe), a jingle dress dancer, and Cozad (Kiowa), a family drum group named after the gracious Freddie Cozad, a veteran drummer who had hoped to attend. He passed away that November, but Hopinka interviewed him earlier in the spring about powwowing, and his words form part of the communal voice-over.  

It says something about the Pacific Northwest that there's so much tribal diversity, though some participants came from as far away as Alberta. 

In his opening remarks, Little Head makes it clear that trans and nonbinary members are welcome--Jamie John describes themselves as gender non-conforming--which recalls Hopinka's Standing Rock short "Dislocation Blues," in which speaker Shaawan Francis Keahna (White Earth Band of Minnesota Ojibwe and Meskwaki) identifies as nonbinary. 

Bearings established, the bulk of the film plays as a riot of color, movement, and sound. Beyond the singers, dancers, and drummers, vendors sell food ("Navajo Fry Bread & Tacos" reads one sign), jewelry, and other handmade items, from t-shirts and hoodies to salmon for two dollars an ounce. 

I particularly enjoyed the free-spirited dancing of the Tiny Tots; most in Native regalia, but a few in conventional summer clothes. Some dance in a traditional manner, others just bop about to "Old McDonald Had a Farm" performed on tribal drums--and all receive "day money" for their efforts.    

I'm sure most of these dancers would perform for cultural and social reasons without the lure of awards, but dancers in every category qualify for prizes including retro jackets and cash--adults can win as much as $4,000. The film ends with an unbroken 30-minute take centered on an elimination round, adding a little tension to Hopinka's pure cinema approach.  

New Mexico filmmaker Shaandiin Tome (Diné) served as cinematographer, while Hopinka provided additional camera work. The results prove less experimental than I expected based on his short films, but there's always something engaging happening on screen. In his work as a whole, he sometimes blurs images while transitioning from one sequence to another. 

In the case of Powwow People, he mostly applies the blurring to the bright, beaded, shimmering, and feathered costumes. It's a lovely effect. 

Other than the voices in the film and a few on-screen inter-titles, Hopinka doesn't spell anything out explicitly, so Powwow People works more as an experiential documentary than an educational one by allowing viewers to see and hear what it might be like to attend or participate in a powwow. 

I wouldn’t have minded subtitles for song lyrics, but I suspect he left them off intentionally, since there's more focus on sounds than words. Beyond the drumming and chanting, others include the ringing metal of the jingle dancers' outfits. 

Of Hopinka's short films, Powwow People most closely resembles 2017's Dislocation Blues and 2021's Kicking the Clouds, particularly when speakers share memories of their ancestors. The film, as a whole, serves as a form of collective memory by capturing ancestral traditions on film while simultaneously creating new ancestral memories for future generations.

Click here for more SIFF 2026 coverage, starting with Mārama.  

There are no more Seattle-area screenings scheduled for Powwow People, but I'll update this post when that changes, streaming opportunities included. Images from Museum of Modern Art, Me (Sky Hopinka), Seattle Met (Ruben Little Head), Michael Sicinski (Tiny Tot), and In Review Online.      

SIFF Dispatch #6: Post-Millennial Mockumentary Meets ‘70s Surrealism in Lady

LADY 

(Samuel Abrahams, UK, 2026, 87 minutes) 

There's nothing quite like the loneliness of the super-rich. 

Instead of opening themselves up to real, human connections, they believe that if they just keep throwing money at the problem--any problem--it will go away. 

That sort of thinking applies to Lady Isabella (Sian Clifford, Fleabag, The Ballad of Wallis Island), mistress of Ravenhyde Hall, who has fashioned herself as a philanthropist, patron of the arts, and friend to the ravens, especially her passerine pal, Ricky (the film was shot on location at Suffolk's Somerleyton Hall, one of The Crown's luxurious royal settings). 

Laurie Kynaston's Sam, a BAFTA-nominated director–much like Samuel Abrahams--meets up with Izzie for the purposes of a profile. She claims that Netflix initiated the project, but she's cagey about the details. She's cagey about a lot of things, and even her housekeeper, Becky (Juliet Cowan), the only other person in the 26-room mansion, seems skittish around her. 

Left: Sian Clifford with creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Fleabag

Granted, Sam isn't quite as stable as he appears, but Izzie isn't just a lonely narcissistic lush. There's something weird going on with her body, and she would prefer not to talk about it. At first, Netflix isn't interested when Sam reaches out, but the weirdness captures their attention, and the project becomes official. 

Sam dedicates himself to solving the mystery. It isn't just about Izzie's ego, but his own, since he believes the profile could put his name on the map--it's possible Abrahams felt the exact same way about his directorial debut.  

In the process, the quasi-fictional Sam gets more than he bargained for, since Izzie, whose husband has been working abroad, isn't just looking for someone to validate her existence, but an artistic collaborator--and possibly a lover, too. Loopy as she is, she's more forceful than the passive Sam, who proves powerless to resist her entreaties, professional ethics be damned. 

Abrahams made Lady in the style of The Office–both versions–in which characters speak to the camera, though we never see the crew, just Samuel, Izzie, and Becky. The director also appears to have taken cues from Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard and the Maysles Brothers' Grey Gardens, since Izzie has Little Edie-like delusions of grandeur yet there's real tragedy underpinning her eccentricities, though Sam has more in common with William Holden in the former than Big Edie in the latter.

For most of its running time, the plot mechanics feel scripted, while the dialogue feels improvised (Abrahams wrote the film with his partner, Miranda Campbell Bowling). Sian Clifford fully commits to the intentionally varied tones, and she's very good, though Lady never quite worked for me as a comedy. I found it best, or most interesting, when Abrahams leaned into surrealism. It's also quite beautifully shot by Korsshan Schlauer in the style of weirdo European manor films, like Louis Malle's 1975 Black Moon. 

Granted, Abrahams ultimately sympathizes--and wants you to sympathize, too--with the loneliness of this one particular super-rich person who isn't quite as shallow as she seems, though she isn't all that deep or talented either. In the hands--mild spoiler!--of a performer other than the go-for-broke Sian Clifford, it might not have worked, not least since Sam can grow tiresome, but it does. 

Clifford is the kind of supporting actress who has long deserved a starring role, which Samuel Abrahams has given her, and Lady's shift from familiar mockumentary beats to something darker and stranger elevates both character and film. I hope it leads to more starring roles in her future.

Click here for SIFF 2026 Dispatch #7: Music, Movement, and Community in Sky Hopinka's Powwow People.

 

Lady plays Sat, May 16, 3:30pm and Sun, May 17, 11:30am at the Uptown. Director Samuel Abrahams scheduled to attend the May 16 screening.  

 

Images from MetFilm Studio / Loud and Clear Reviews (Sian Clifford and Laurie Kynaston), BBC (Clifford and Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Fleabag), The Guardian (Clifford as seen by Samuel Abrahams), and screen shot from the film of one of the bizarre, unexplained interstitials between sequences.